Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (34 page)

Shit, they
had
to be crazy. They
had
to hear the choppers and feel the downdraft, even if they couldn’t see any lights. Maybe they assumed the COG was too gentlemanly and civilized to unleash its superior firepower on a bunch of randomly armed civvies.

Wrong call, asshole
.

The night suddenly lit up as Gettner switched on the Raven’s searchlight. A brilliant white shaft raked the shore and shallows, picking out one of the inflatables like a cabaret spot. For a moment, just a moment, the raiding party stared up, hair flattened by the downdraft, spray whipping around them.

“I really
wanted
to see fishing nets,” Gettner sighed. Then the bullhorn boomed. “Drop the fucking weapons, vermin, or I
will
open fire.”

Dom’s eye caught upward movement as an assortment of rifles lifted and aimed. He didn’t take in anything else, only the weapons. A pipe -like barrel jerked up almost vertically just a split second before a yellow ball of discharged gas blew out behind it. A grenade round hit the Raven. Fire spat from the air down at the boats, raising a neat line of water.

Been there. Been on the receiving end of that, a long time ago
.

Dom fired out of pure reflex. His save -yourself instinct was screaming:
Watch out for the Raven, the bird’s
been hit, it’s going
down
. But nothing hit him, and there was no fireball. When he turned, the Raven was hovering, firing short bursts into the shallows. More boats skidded up the shingle and Dom opened fire again, punching through one of the rubber hulls. Three men jumped out of it and ran ashore, and Dom jumped up to sprint after them. Automatic fire—some Lancer, some not—rattled up and down the beach. The bastards were landing at multiple points.

Marcus cut in. “Gettner, you hit?”

“If they’d done more than clip the boarding step, you’d know all about it.”

“Give me some light by the slipway, then.”

“On it.”

“I have a visual on the ’Dill.” That was Sorotki. “Heading for … yeah, I see them, three big junkers, heading into town. Going in to welcome them to Pelruan …”

“Hey, mind my tanks, shithead.” Gettner must have been taking more fire from the ground. “Barber, smoke them before they hit the reserve fuel, will you?”

Dom reached the edge of the buildings, panting. The Stranded had vanished into the streets. That was the last thing he needed. He couldn’t see the bastards, and the homes were mainly wooden structures that gave no protection to anyone inside, a bad place for a firefight. It was even worse knowing there were civvies huddled in every building who wouldn’t have a clue how to stay down and let Gears deal with the cleanup.

“Dom!” Baird sounded out of breath. “I’m heading right toward you. We’re going to intersect by the town hall.”

“Where the hell
are
you? Can you see me? I can’t see you.”

“Running parallel with the road where the bar is.” He paused. “Amateurs. Homemade firebombs—”

Glass smashed. A tongue of yellow flame leapt above the low roofline, and the
whoomp
of igniting fuel followed by more Lancer fire gave Dom something to run at. He skidded around the next corner, trying to orient himself by the light of the fire, and caught sight of one of the Stranded running full tilt down the road. He stopped and squeezed off a burst. The guy pitched forward and fell on one side. Dom was suddenly aware of screaming—

a woman’s voice from out in the open, not muffled by walls.

Shit
.

Dom had shot someone in the back. For a terrible moment he thought he’d dropped a civilian who’d come out to defend their property or something. He ran for the body, but Baird appeared out of a side alley and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Locals are firefighting,” he said. “Shit, I hate urban ops. You can’t hose anything.”

“I’ve lost at least two of them.”

“It’s a small town. How far can they get?”

“How much damage can they do?”

Wooden buildings, narrow streets, fire
. Dom could work it out. Voice traffic had been almost zero for a few minutes, but now Dom’s earpiece went on overload.

“Shore, clear.” Bernie said. “Boats—clear. Eight-Zero, can you see anything else down there?”

“Negative, Mataki. Heading over to the town.”

“Anya, Sorotki—Fenix here. What’s happening your side?”

“Roadblocking.” Anya was shouting over the noise of a Raven. Sorotki sounded like he was almost parked on top of the ’Dill. “Because I can’t drive and operate the gun at the same time.”

Machine-gun fire started up in short bursts, and then the distinctive sound of the ’Dill’s belt-fed gun joined it. Dom could have sworn he heard Anya whoop. That was so unlike her that it shook him. He ran where the two Stranded had gone, following the light of another burning building, and straight into a knot of men from the town

—shit, he hoped he could tell the difference—with a scruffy bearded guy pinned bodily to the ground. One of the men put a hunting rifle to the Stranded’s head and pulled the trigger.

Oh God oh God oh God …

For a few seconds, Dom was back in the Hollow, one simple movement of his trigger finger marking the line between finding what he’d searched for so desperately and destroying it forever.
Oh God, Maria, I’m so sorry …

The group of men looked up at Dom as if he’d crashed a party.

“What the hell’s wrong with you? The bastard asked for it.” There was a Gnasher shotgun lying on the road, COG issue. One of the men grabbed it. “We told you to let us deal with this. What the hell are you going to do now? Let them burn us out?”

Dom snapped back to being Dom the Gear, ready to deal with anything. “You look after the firefighting,” he said, poking his finger hard in the man’s chest. “Leave the Stranded to us. Okay?”

“You started this. You provoked them.”

Baird caught up with him and they left the civilians to it, realizing that Gears weren’t coming across as the heroes of the hour in Pelruan. This wasn’t Jacinto. The locals didn’t see Gears as saviors, the last line of defense. They were just outsiders that they didn’t invite and didn’t understand.

“I’ve lost the other asshole.”

“Screw him,” Baird said. “Hear that?” There was crazed barking, but it was coming from outside now, not the houses. “They’ve let the dogs loose. Wow, they must train them to take out Stranded. I’m impressed.”

Dom stopped dead. “Marcus? Anya? Anyone need backup? We lost our quarry.”

The Lancer fire from the shore had stopped. Dom could hear people coming out of the houses, calling to their neighbors to check if they were okay. Baird yelled at them to get back indoors because it wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot. If they heard him, they took no notice.

“Ahh,
shit.”
That was Marcus with his radio channel open. Dom had no idea where he was. “Get back inside, lady … Cole, get them back inside.
Shit
. Dom? We’re clear shoreside. Get down to the road and mop up anyone from the junkers.”

Baird ran alongside Dom. “Next time we hit a new town, first thing we do is memorize the street plan.”

“Yeah.”

“We’d have been screwed without the Ravens.”

“I never said Stranded were dumb.”

There was one road out of Pelruan to the south, now marked by a pall of smoke and flame. The town was so small that if you stood at the right point, or got some elevation, you could see everything from the road to the shore in one axis, and from one headland to the next in the other. Even in darkness—it was 0405 now—the aftermath of the fighting was visible. Dom climbed up on a dry-stone wall and scanned the area. There were five or six fires, some already being damped down, and both Ravens were now out over the open country to the south, searchlights directed, guns occasionally loosing off bursts of fire.

Dom and Baird ran on. By the time they got to the roadblock, Cole was hauling out bodies, and the two Ravens were heading back, their nose lights visible head -on. Two junkers lay on their sides, burning fiercely, and the third was upright with its roof ripped open like a tin can.

“I’d hate to see the Lieutenant when she’s in a
pissy
mood,” Cole said. “Damn, you seen the collection of toys these jokers got? There’s
grubs
with less firepower than this.”

The ’Dill had stopped at a point where the road sloped away sharply into the river on one side and soft ground on the other. Perfect choke point: Anya definitely had the right stuff. Dom just didn’t want to see her end up like her mom, killed in a magnificent but crazy single-handed charge. It might have been great for the movies, but it was shit for the people left to grieve. The top hatch opened slowly and Anya eased her head and shoulders clear. Dom wouldn’t have said she looked pleased with herself, not quite, but in the light from the fires she had a certain shine to her cheeks like she’d just come back from a brisk walk.

“You can’t see much from this gun position,” she said.

Baird clapped a few times. “Great debut.”

“I think Mitchell did most of the work.” She ducked back down and came out through the front hatch. When she saw Cole clearing up, her face changed, and Dom wondered if she’d suddenly made the connection at gut level that the targets she’d been firing at so diligently were actually flesh and blood. “How many of them are there?”

“We’ll count ’em proper when the Ravens are done playing fighter jocks,” Cole said. “Shit, seen that chunk out of Gettner’s bird? Whole step ripped off the crew bay. She’s lucky she ain’t toast.”

“We’ll hear all about it.” Baird collected the weapons, an assortment that was mainly automatic rifles and grenade launchers. He paused to take a naval officer’s ceremonial sword off a Stranded’s belt. “Whoa, Captain Charisma won’t like you playing pirates with
that
, buddy. Show some respect.”

Dom slid his hand inside his armor to check that his photographs were still safe. “You okay, Anya?”

“I’m … I’m fine, Dom. Just not trained for this.”

“Hell, who is? You ever killed anyone before?”

“I think I hit a Locust or two when we first reached Port Farrall,” she said. “But never a human.”

Baird just looked at her. “You still haven’t…”

Cole just shook his head. The flames were dying down in one of the junkers, and he ventured in to pull out a body that was half out of the driver’s seat. Dom only saw the movement as he tugged on it. Cole froze and turned away. “Aww … shit, this one’s … aww, hell.”

Dom wondered what could disgust Cole. Any man who could chainsaw his way through a squad of grubs and laugh his ass off wasn’t the squeamish kind. It took Dom a while to work out what he was looking at, but then the blackened shapes resolved into something recognizable: the body had come apart in two halves when Cole pulled at it.

“Gross,” Dom said, and finished the job for him.

Humans … it
was
different. People weren’t grubs, not even the really shitty ones. Baird peered over his shoulder, then went on loading the salvaged weapons into the ’Dill, still whistling. Gears generally despised Stranded—as savages, thieves, cowards, parasites—but Dom had always tried to get on with them because he needed their help. He’d lost count of the number of Stranded he’d stopped in the streets and shown Maria’s picture. Had they seen her? It was always no, until the last day, and then it had been too late.
Why don’t I blame them?

“Why d’you hate ’em so much, Baird?” Cole asked.

Baird counted off on his fingers with a theatrical flourish. “Failure to engage with the implied social compact between citizens and state. And the fact that they stink like shit.” He looked at his gloves, frowning. “Oh, yeah, I forgot—they’re mean to people we like.”

Marcus’s voice cut in on the radio circuit. “Delta, we’re done here. Everyone back to the slipway to clean up the debris. Baird—find some welding equipment and fix Gettner’s bird so that she shuts up.”

Baird drove the ’Dill down the narrow roads back to the shore. Pelruan seemed to have two natural centers, two places where people tended to congregate. One was outside the town hall—not exactly a square, more like a village green—and the other was the row of houses closest to the sea, almost a semicircle looking down the shallow slope into the harbor. Baird parked the ’Dill, headlights angled down onto the shore to illuminate it, and everyone dismounted. A growing crowd of locals had come out to look. Some stood with arms folded, looking shocked, but some were obviously mad as hell, and not just with the Stranded. Dom saw one guy yelling at Marcus while Gavriel and Berenz stood between them, making calm-down gestures with their hands.

“Vernon, nobody got hurt,” Berenz said. “The damage can be repaired. But
nobody got hurt.”

Vernon turned on him. “Yeah, and they wouldn’t have come here at all if it hadn’t been for this bunch throwing their weight around—when did we last get raided? They don’t know how we do things here.”

“Vern, Stranded could come back and raid us anytime. But do you seriously think they’ll be back now?”

“Face it, Will—our way of life here is
over
. In one damn day, everything’s changed.”

Dom listened, resentful.
Well, now you know how the rest of the world felt on E-Day, asshole. But we’re not
grubs. We’re your own
.

Gavriel steered the guy away. Marcus, being Marcus, just stood there in silence and let it roll off him, looking more interested in the bodies that were being laid out. Bernie examined them. They were looking for something. Dom jogged over with Baird to check.

“No Massy yet.” Marcus rubbed his neck as if he’d pulled a muscle. “Twenty-six bodies so far.”

“He might be one of the barbecued ones,” Baird said helpfully. “We’ve got a stack out on the road.”